frick

With a Hello Kitty retrospective coming up at the Japanese American National Museum, a Hello Kitty scholar has stomped all over the dreams of kawaii-eyed youth by revealing hat Hello Kitty is not a cat: “She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat.” In sum, Hello Kitty and Garfield belong to two different cartoon genome pools. [Culture: High & Low]

Russell Page’s garden at the Frick is being demolished to make way for the upcoming expansion. The Frick claims that the garden, once hailed by the New York Times as one of Page’s “most important works,” was never meant to be permanent. As a 1977 press release shows, though, this is a flat out lie. Who knew the Frick could be so controversial. [The Huffington Post]

If several thousand dollar easter egg hunts disguised as art are your kind of thing: ArtistMichael Sailstorferburies gold bars at the Folkstone triennial at high tide and waits patiently for low tide. At that point finders will be keepers. From a statement to the Guardian by Triennial curator Lewis Biggs: “I think we might well have a lot of people.” [The Guardian]

Adrian Searle has the review of the Folkstone Triennial. There’s a discussion of the Sailstorfer piece, a round-up of works Searle liked, and some complaints about Yoko Ono and Andy Goldsworthy. Meh. [The Guardian]

Ben Lerner’s new novel, 10:04, gets a thumbs up in the New Republic, and I can tell why. This narrator in the novel writes 10:04 as you’re reading it, and there’s scenes that blend non-fiction and sci-fi nearly seamlessly, like one where the protagonist starts having visions while walking along the High Line after eating a plate of hallucinogenic octopus. [New Republic]

Some notes on gigantic rabbit breeds: the now-extinct Minorcan King of Rabbits, due to its weight, was unable to hop. [Modern Farmer]

Hissbitch published “5 worst net artists” for Christmas last year, and at the time, blogger Tom Moody predicted the post would be deleted, just as their “10 worst net artist” post. We ran across Moody’s post again yesterday, and as predicted the Hissbitch post was deleted. So too is Hissbitch, which now seems to be taken over by Chinese characters. [Tom Moody]

Glenn Ligon in association with MZ Wallace has created a tote bag to benefit the Studio Museum in Harlem. [MZ Wallace]

Season seven of ART21 will showcase a topic that’s been close to us on the blog. For the show’s debut episode, they followed Thomas Hirschhorn around to discuss the Gramsci Monument at Forest Houses, described as “a new kind of monument that, while physically ephemeral, lives on in collective memory.” That episode premieres Friday, October 24 at 10:00 p.m. ET. [ART21]

Harun Farocki has passed away. We’ll have our write up on that later today. [artnet News]

The Bank of Canada needs a better fact-checker, and quick! The wrong mountain was named on the country’s $10 bill. [The Globe and Mail]

So many journalists have taken up talking about art funds as if they were entirely new. Jori Finkel, writing for The Art Newspaper, went digging through the Getty’s archives to tell a compelling story about the first successful art fund, organized by AndréLevel. Good job, Finkel. [The Art Newspaper]

Michael Kimmelman’s riposte to the Frick’s proposed expansion: “The Museum of Modern Art’s demolition of the American Folk Art Museum building…is probably what finally tipped some invisible scale of public tolerance against the culture of market capitalism and arrogant growth. The city’s truest anti-MoMA, the Frick becomes the latest front in a larger battle to prevent nonprofit outposts of civilization from falling prey to the bigger-is-better paradigm.” [The New York Times]

A very cool job opportunity: Pelican Bomb, a contemporary art blog in New Orleans, is hiring a full-time managing editor. [Pelican Bomb]

How long can politically minded arts organizations like Creative Time continue to bat off positions on issues like gentrification and the BDS movement? Yates McKee offers a thorough analysis of the political dilemmas of art after Occupy. [Waging Nonviolence]

Frieze London announces the fair’s performance section: “UNITED BROTHERS will present a dilemma to visitors, by offering soup cooked by their mother using vegetables grown in Fukishima.” So, you either eat the soup, or refuse in case you’ll get radiation poisoning. Not a bad outgrowth of relational aesthetics. [Frieze]

Stay inside, New York. There are many ways to die by snow today. [The Awl]

Attendance at the Frick has more than doubled now that they’re borrowing Vermeer’s “Girl With the Pearl Earring.” Frick staff lets on that over 100,000 visitors have made their way into the collection since the October opening of Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals. [Real Clear Arts]

Can the art world ever recover from the influence of celebrity and entertainment on art? “No way,” remarked one curator at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. “And why would we, with such crossover programming in the upcoming year like Paparzzi! Photographers, Stars, and Artists?”* (*NOT A REAL QUOTE, BUT THIS IS A REAL EXHIBITION.) [e-flux]

Residents and business owners in the LES and and East Village want to keep SantaCon’s drunken hordes out of their streets. Let the protests begin. [Bowery Boogie]

Wow. Larry Gagosian has some harsh words for the new breed of collectors and partiers coming out to Miami. “Two years ago, the audience was a little more interesting from the perspective of the galleries that come here.” [Women’s Wear Daily, Alain Servais]

Ah! LACMA is starting up its Art and Technology program again—the very same one from the 1960s. They sent Claes Oldenburg to do research at Disney; John Chamberlain to Rand Corporation; Richard Serra to Kaiser Steel. Now it’s different; mostly, the program gives office space at the museum. [The New York Times]

Missed this one last week, but the Van Gogh Museum is authorizing 3-D reproductions of Van Gogh’s masterworks. $35,000 for Starry Night, y’all. The first round will debut in January, at the L.A. Art Show. [Los Angeles Times]

Do subjective end-of-year lists not make you angry? Then go ahead, read Complex’s 25 Most Important Artists of 2013 list. Francis Bacon, who just sold the world’s most expensive painting at auction barely scrapes by in the 22nd slot; Robert Indiana is just a nudge ahead of him at 21. Top artists include those who have collaborated with Lady Gaga (#10: Inez and Vinoodh) and Pharrell (#5: Daniel Arsham, #8: JR). Celebrity art collaborations ≠ Most Important Artists. [Complex]